mistakes

I know it rankles a lot of people, because no one is in a very forgiving mood these days (please write in with any counter-examples; I will gladly take back my words), but in America, if you make a mistake, you can (in most cases) apologize—”I made an error in judgment”—recant, seek forgiveness, and move on.

Unless you’re Hillary Clinton, there’s always a good chance, for example, that people will simply forget who you are and what you did, never mind why it was considered anathema (or, for that matter, fabulous. By the time Deep Throat’s identity was finally revealed, more people seemed to care about the impact on Bob Woodward and the WaPo, scooped by Vanity Fair[!], than about the resolution of this 30-year-old mystery).

Upshot:

If you want to have a great reveal,

do it before your fans keel

over.

Dead.

—Hepzeeba Smith, “Infotainment Rule #14,” 2007

But I digress. What I wanted to say was this:
In Iran, as opposed to the forgiving U.S. and A., there are no mistakes or errors in judgment. There are only “incorrect perceptions of reality.” And they have consequences:

The biggest treachery of an analyst or a decision-maker to oneself is that he/she may not see the reality the way it is but instead tries to filter or interpret the information related to the operational environment based on his/her own presumptions, beliefs, feelings, intentions and interests. Incorrect perception of the reality derails the decision-maker, whether an individual or a system, toward a wrong path, thus endangering his/her survival.

Now, those are people who really know the meaning of party discipline.